{"id":1319,"date":"2020-08-28T12:02:37","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T10:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2025-03-04T05:09:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T04:09:23","slug":"search-engine-tip-prevent-duplicate-content-by-removing-wildcard-subdomain-from-dns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/search-engine-tip-prevent-duplicate-content-by-removing-wildcard-subdomain-from-dns\/","title":{"rendered":"Search Engine Tip: Prevent Duplicate Content By Removing Wildcard Subdomain From DNS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>If you have a website, it is important to only publish it in one place.&nbsp;The underlying reason is that Google and other search engines do not like it if they find the same information in multiple places (so-called duplicate content).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How is that possible if you do not intentionally copy pages to other places?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One possibility is that your website can be accessed via multiple URLs.&nbsp;For example, we will give you a temporary URL if the domain has not yet been moved or is in the air.&nbsp;In addition, the DNS is set up so that you can come to your site via any subdomain.&nbsp;If you use WordPress you already set the website URL via Settings&gt; General.&nbsp;If visitors are received on another (sub) domain, WordPress will immediately send the visitor to the correct domain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you now know which domain your website should be active on, then in many cases you can prevent your website from being accessed in several ways by a few simple steps (of course use your own domain instead of example.com below):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Log in to the account center&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/ac.managedomain.nl\/\">https:\/\/ac.managedomain.nl\/<\/a><\/li><li>Select the domain that you want to set;<\/li><li>Look under \u201cManage Subdomains\u201d (and dig into your memory) and write down the subdomains that you use;<\/li><li>Select \u201cName Servers\u201d;<\/li><li>See if you find a line with an asterisk and an A, something like this:&nbsp;<strong>* .example.com A 1.2.3.4 3600<br><\/strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"593\" height=\"23\" src=\"https:\/\/www.henselhosting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-12-02-19_36_23-Search-engine-tip_-prevent-duplicate-content-by-removing-wildcard-subdomain-from-1.png\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.henselhosting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-12-02-19_36_23-Search-engine-tip_-prevent-duplicate-content-by-removing-wildcard-subdomain-from-1.png 593w, https:\/\/www.henselhosting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-12-02-19_36_23-Search-engine-tip_-prevent-duplicate-content-by-removing-wildcard-subdomain-from-1-300x12.png 300w\"><\/li><li>Write down the IP of the line with the asterisk (or take a screenshot), then you can easily undo it later by creating a new line with the same data.&nbsp;You also need the IP address in step 8;<\/li><li>If you do see this rule, check-in the browser whether&nbsp;<em>www.example.com<\/em>&nbsp;but also&nbsp;<em>www123.example.com<\/em>&nbsp;, for example,&nbsp;<em>remain<\/em>&nbsp;in the browser with identical content, without redirecting the visitor to the main domain;<\/li><li>So if you can put a number of different URLs in the browser and they all display the same website, it is better that you delete the line with the asterisk.<br><strong>Note<\/strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;that if you have other subdomains in use (see step 3), they will stop working if you delete the line with the asterisk.&nbsp;To prevent this, you can add the subdomains to the Name Server settings by creating one or more A records with the same IP as the asterisk (as you noted in step 6).<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>After changing the Name Server data, it may take a while for the changes to work.&nbsp;Internet providers can sometimes remember the data up to a day later.&nbsp;Therefore, for testing after step 8, it is better to use subdomains that you have not previously entered in the browser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Better DNS settings make everyone happy.&nbsp;So get started and if you have any questions, we are always there for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PS: From mid-February 2017, the * record is no longer automatically created for new orders and name server records are automatically added and deleted when creating\/deleting subdomains via \u201cManage Subdomains\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PPS: For more advanced use you can also indicate to search engines which of the identical pages is the actual source, by means of \u201ccanonicalization\u201d, see also:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/66359?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/66359?hl=en<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you have a website, it is important to only publish it in one place.&nbsp;The underlying reason is that Google and other search engines do not like it if they find the same information in multiple places (so-called duplicate content). How is that possible if you do not intentionally copy pages to other places? One [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hosting-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1320,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions\/1320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smartstermedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}